As far as the issue of planned obsolescence is concerned, the more competition you have in the marketplace, the better the product you're going to get, so hopefully, those products are going to last longer.
One of the key drivers to this is innovation. If we want to avoid things like planned obsolescence, there are a couple of things. There's being able to get the parts you need to make repairs. At the end of the day, hopefully, we can just buy products that are initially going to last longer, so that you don't have to buy parts to repair every year. It would be even better if the original pieces lasted longer.
Think of a deep-freeze, for example. Technologies change and the way they are made or manufactured is very different. My parents bought a house that was built in the seventies that still had a deep-freeze. I swear the house had been built around the deep-freeze, because we couldn't get it out of the basement, but it was still running and it was 40 or 45 years old. I wish you good luck buying a deep-freeze today that will last 40 or 45 years.
When you look at some of the names of the companies back then that were making these things, there was lots of competition. Now it seems to have dwindled. There might be a few different names, but when you look at the back, it's the same parent company that's manufacturing under a few different names. We don't really have as great competition as we would need to help push some of these products to be made better than they are right now.
We can address the issue of planned obsolescence in part by driving innovation. That's what this bill will hopefully do.